Connecting Google Webmasters Tools to Google Analytics

This article covers connecting up two key services, Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Tools. In a forthcoming series of articles we’ll be exploring how to improve your digital marketing, and in particular, reviewing and optimising your website. A key part to improving your website is measuring its performance. Associating Google Webmasters Tools data in Google Analytics will give you a better understanding of how your visitors find your website.

Before you start

Before you start, you’ll need to have Google Analytics and Google Webmasters Tools setup, and for the latter, make sure that your site is verified. If you don’t have Webmasters Tools already, head over and get setup here, Google Webmaster Tools.

Steps for connecting

Connecting these two accounts is easy and should take less than five minutes.

1) To begin, login to your analytics account. Looking at the report’s section on the left hand side of the page, find the Acquisition tab. Inside this tab, there is another sub-tab labelled, Search Engine Optimisation. Expanding this tab reveals even more menu items.

Acquisition > Search Engine Optimisation > Queries

Clicking any of these menu sub-items will reveal a pane to the right of the menu items, with a prompt to begin the process of associating your accounts together. Go ahead and click the button labelled “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing”.

All images in this article can be clicked to expand.

Beginning the linking process

2) Once you’ve clicked the button to set up Webmasters Tools, you’ll arrive on the property settings page for your current Analytics account. You’ll need to scroll all the way to the bottom of this page to find the settings you need. Click the edit button to proceed with the process.

Editing your Analytics property

3) At last, we’re actually inside Webmasters Tools and ready to link our account. The resulting page should read “Enable Webmasters Tools data in Google Analytics” and you will see a list of all the verified websites you have in your account. In our example we’re going to be connecting up our photography site, http://www.lightflows.com. This is done by selecting the check box next to the website in question, then clicking Save.

List of verified web properties in Webmasters Tools

You’ll be presented with a dialogue asking if you want to confirm the linking. If you’re happy, click OK.

Confirming you wish to connect your account

4) Once you’ve confirmed the connection, you’ll be returned to the Analytics property page, which should show you that your Analytics account is linked with one Webmaster profile.

Go ahead and click Save.

Confirmation of linked accounts.

5) That’s it! You should now be able to see Webmaster Tools data inside the Search Engine Optimisation reporting section of your Analytics dashboard.

New reports

The new reports provide some particularly useful information.

Queries

The queries report provides precise information to the exact search terms visitors are using to find your site, the report even provides the average position your site ranks at for each search term. Measuring these positions over time will let you see how effective your SEO is. (we’ll be covering comparing dates ranges in our new article series).

Landing pages

The landing pages report shows the most popular pages on your website which your visitors arrive on. You may be surprised as to your most popular content. Each of these landing pages represents a great opportunity to engage and interest your customers.

Conclusion

We hope you find this simple tip useful. Follow us on Twitter or Google+ for updates.